Enrico Intra's To the Victims of Vietnam, 1974 [with flac]

 

Wonderfully subtitled "Opera di musica totale"... A part of this work, one of the more serious composed works by this composer, appeared on the Consonance, Dissonance posted earlier here.  I think it was a wonderful idea to create this, and it's unfortunate that the term Vietnam Syndrome is now so lost from our collective newsworthy vocabulary.

A minor second on some elegiac strings starts this work and appears repeatedly throughout as the thematic idea, a tritone is introduced with the deeper section and builds up to crescendo perhaps offering us a musical representation of the slow but steady buildup of death and war that was a feature of this crazy decadal period when, if you might recall, or ever learned, the thought that countries were like dominos that would topple throughout the world leading to communism taking over everywhere was predominant.  I think we should switch 'communism' with 'autocracy' and get scared again because there's a whole new set of dominos ready to knock over us.

There is a nice mix here of the orchestral, the classical composed stuff that is, with fusion rhythms although it never gets funky or electrified overly. The first movement introduces a bit of fusion but simplistically, the second has a nice atonal piano solo, the third kind of reaches a happy climax with a jazz band and sax solo.  Then there is a kind of throwaway track for me which is the electronic section, basically musique concrete with nothing to hold on to in terms of tonality or melody.

The 5th which is the 4th Movement combines all the preceding strands (piano, orchestra, fusion) nicely into one kind of climax before the Finale just repeats the minor second and tritonal dissonances for the twentieth (haha) or last time.

Still, I would love to know if there's anything as nice as Paopop left in that discography to be discovered!  This was a happy surprise.